Calendars

At my old job, I had one phone, my personal iPhone. There was no limitation against putting the company mail/calendar on it, so long as you applied their security profile (which, frankly, I didn’t mind, as it protected my data as well). I kept my work mail in a distinct app from my personal mail, as I wanted to conciously go into it to check, rather than accidentally go in on the weekend and freak out.

My calendar, however, was all in the same app. I actually liked that: it was good to see all my appointments, work and personal, next to each other. I could figure out how to balance stuff, if I needed to not have something happen, etc. Once I got my Apple Watch, alerts for meetings of any sort got piped to it.

At the new job, however, I got issued a phone. It sounds like I could have put it on my phone, but it sounded non-standard and a bit awkward. I didn’t feel like poking that bear, and figured I could change it down the road. so far, aside from sometimes being annoying to have the extra phone, it hasn’t been too big a deal.

The disadvantage is my work calendar isn’t on my personal phone. I don’t get to see my appointments all together, and I don’t get alerts on my watch. There are only really two work-arounds:

• Sync All Calendars to My Work Phone I don’t like this from a personal security perspective–I assume my company can read my work phone (even if it’s simply my boss asking me to unlock the device and hand it to them)–it’s their device, they pay the bill, and it’s their data on it. Plus, I’d have to also sync my watch to it for calendars, which means other apps would have to sync to it…
• Create a Mirror of My Work Calendar This is the route I’ve taken. I’ve created a Google Calendar on one of my accounts, and create entries that mirror my work calendar. I don’t put all the details, just a high level meeting name (“Meeting” in some cases), and the initials of who I’m meeting with. My assumption is it could be a security thing to dump company stuff into the cloud.

This is a pain. I could gripe about this a bit, and I suspect I’m not the only one with this challenge. However, I also can’t really find a clean work-around. The best I might be able to do is write a script to automate this process, but that has it’s own issues.